Mike's Flying

It’s been a while.

As predicted by more than a few people, my dedication to mikesflying.com waned after a couple of months. This will not do. I’m resurrecting the site and the blog as of now – with a new resoloution to blog at least once a week – if not more. Luckily now I’m stuck into Phase 2 of my training and I’m actually being allowed behind the controls of real aircraft I’ve got a whole lot more to write about. I can’t guarante insightful, eloquent or even particularly interesting prose, but I can guarantee that I’ll enjoy writing my humble submissions.

So, given that I’m going to keep this fairly concise, I’ll fill you all in on the last few months:

Feb: Study leave, revising for JAR exams.

March: Sat JAR exams and…

Passed them all! marks as follows:

• Principles of Flight: 80%
• Aircraft general Knowledge: 95%
• Mass and balance: 100%
• General navigation: 91%
• Meterology: 83%
• Radio navigation: 92%

This give a nice healthy average of 90.2%.

April: Start Flying! Complete my First solo on my 10th hour – and christen my new callsign: ‘Cygnet 315‘

May: Not such a happy month. The month got off to a bad start when I broke up with Andrena. It’s a long an involved story, and for both of our sake I’m not going into it all here. Suffice to say that being run-off-my-feet busy with flying and work here in Phase 2 leaves me wonderfully little time to dwell on it all. On the up side I’ve accrued a few more solo hours and I’ve also started Instrument flying in anger.

Well, that’s you brought quickly and roughly up to date, I’ll be back soon!

26 sayings that indicate the ideal, synergystic working relationship:

1. I can see your point, but I still think you’re full of crap.
2. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don’t care.
3. How about “never”? Is “never” good for you?
4. It sounds like English, but I can’t understand a word you’re saying.
5. I see you’ve set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.
6. My toys! My toys! I can’t do this job without my toys!
7. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.
8. I’m already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.
9. The fact that no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist.
10. Someday, we’ll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.
11. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
12. I don’t know what your problem is, but I’ll bet it’s hard to pronounce.
13. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
14. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
15. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?
16. I’m not being rude. You’re just insignificant.
17. Thank you. We’re all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.
18. It’s a thankless job, but I’ve got a lot of Karma to burn off.
19. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
20. No, my powers can only be used for good.
21. I’m really easy to get along with once people learn to worship me.
22. You sound reasonable……time to up my medication.
23. I’ll try being nicer if you’ll try being smarter.
24. I’m out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
25. I don’t work here. I’m a consultant.
26. Who me? I just wander from room to room.

And now Useful Expressions for those High Stressdays

1. I’m not tense, just terribly, terribly alert.
2. Not the brightest crayon in the box now, are we?
3. Do I look like a fucking people person?
4. This isn’t an office. It’s Hell with fluorescent lighting.
5. I pretend to work. They pretend to pay me.
6. You! Off my planet!!
7. Practice random acts of intelligence & senseless acts of self-control.
8. I like cats too. Let’s exchange recipes.
9. Did the aliens forget to remove your anal probe?
10. And your crybaby whiny-assed opinion would be…?
11. How many times do I have to flush before you go away?
12. Aw, did I step on your poor little bitty ego ?
13. How do I set a laser printer to stun?
14. When I want your opinion, I’ll give it to you.
15. Earth is full, Go home.

Study.

I venture that it’s a dangerously obscure term.

Take for example how I spent a portion of last night (I make no excuses). I spent a good hour building myself a model glider out of Paper and sellotape. Technically I class this as ‘study’, seeing as I was taking care of such things as the angle of incidence, thrust/drag coupling, center of gravity position and the wing dihedral in an attempt to make the thing fairly stable.

Needless to say the craft was a failure. One is limited in ones prowess with a pair of blunt scissors and packaging tape, and little to no knowledge  of the specific aerodynamic challanges facing a model aircraft. Mark 1 of the Mike Flyer how hangs from the ceiling of my room as a reminder of how not to build such things.

I digress. Study is what I’m turning my mind to over the next few weeks. Given that we’ve only 4 weeks of work left before we start the study-leave before our mock exams. Then it’s a week of no classes, a week of mock exams, then a week of no classes and then a week of our JAR exams. The big ones.

The school has developed many facilities to help us through these exams, the instructors are very happy to discuss any problems or points requiring clarification. We have access to something called ‘Feedback’ which is just a coined term for ‘Past Papers’, which are old JAA exam questions. This is especially good because when the nice men set these exams they only deign to add a few new questions every sitting, in theory it’s possible to pass just by memorising all the previously asked questions. Indeed, the nice people down at Bristol Flying school keep an up to date database of all the questions and will allow you access to it for three months for the miserly sum of £50. If you choose to do it that way you’re basically paying £50 to guarantee your passing the JAR exams.

Of course, this ‘Bristoling’ (as it has become known here) isn’t admired by the airlines, and so a healthy working knowledge of any given subject is usually tested at interview.

All in all, I’m going to have an interesting few weeks as we rush to complete the Meteorology syllabus and slowly forget what we’ve learnt in our (recently completed) Radio Navigation lessons.

So until next time, Mk2 of the Mike Flyer is due it’s first flight test.

Well, I’m back out in Spain after the Christmas Break.

Firstly, I’m sorry I’ve not been updating the site over the last two weeks. There’s been a minor mountian of work to climb to get back into the swing of Groundschool here and I’ve been focusing on that. On this note, you may well loose me around the end of Febuary as I start working in earnest for the JAR exams that hearald the end of Phase 1.

I’ll have photo’s from the holiday up as soon as I can get them uploaded to my Flickr account.

Christmas was wonderful, I’d like to thank Andrena’s family for putting up with me for the duration. I spent my time chopping wood, playing squash and generally doing anything that didn’t feel like work. We even got away to Wales for a few days in between Christmas and New Year.

I’ll have more details and stories for you all when I’ve got the photos to go along with them

One thing I did notice on arriving back is that compared to England, Spain is still rather warm (even though it was beginning to feel rather artic here before the holiday).

Well, today was anything but normal.

In no particular order:

• Watched from up close as firetrucks extinguished some burning wreckage
• Broke my leg
• Didn’t speak spanish to spanish medical professionals
• Laid on a plastic sheet on the pan for 40 minutes
• Spoke even less spanish to spanish medical professionals
• Was dragged to my feet
• Effected a miraclous recovery of my stricken leg
• Proceeded to watch an Air Berlin flight get pushed back away from the terminal building
• Was refused entry to the airport for about 3 hours
• Eventually met up with my parents, who proceeeded to teach me Meterology

If that’s not a strange day, I’m not sure what is.

Ok, ok, I’ll tell the whole story.

On Monday the student body was informed that the airport was due to be checked on it’s disaster response. This involves testing the fire service, airport security, and the medical teams simulteanously. In essence, a crash of reasonable magnitude is simulated. As a (boradly) non-spanish speaking group of people the students of FTE were offered the chance to star as the passengers and crew of ‘Fenix 08′ a doomed Embraer 95 suffering from a catastrophic landing gear failure.

Sounds interesting, eh? We were briefed on the proceedings fairly loosely on Tuesday. We were each given the injuries we were to effect and told roughly what would be happening. The simuation was to be as realistic as could be managed so a full paramedic response, including heli-med was planned. Among the injuries were a couple with brain damage, burns victims including someone with 45% 2nd degree burns, two broken legs (of which I was one), a broken arm, and a multitude of people with cuts and grazes.

So this morning we all trooped out to the pan (cleared of aircraft for the exercise) and watched as they set up a small fire to play with.

The fire from the 'wreckage' of the Embraer

Dousing the flames with foam from the Monitor

After this we had to run to our places and begin being the loudest, awkardest and most distraught bunch of air crash victims we could manage. We had specific instructions to be as trying as possible, it was a test after all. Several of the less-injured satrted wandering off in random directions, whereas the less mobile of us waited for the medical teams to arrive and start the ardous task of processing us all.

The tags we were given denoting injury and severity - yes the top stripe is 'dead'

When they did arrive, we were all given a tag with tear-off strips (the more strips torn off, the worse the tagee’s situation) and a small diagram marking the position and type of injury we had sustained. After this they sorted us into three groups based on the seriousness of our condition, and we were moved and laid on tarpaulins in these groups. Up to this point, everything had gone like clockwork (though one is reminded that the spanish for ‘punctual’ is ‘add 20 minutes’ ).

However, at this point we started to notice the exercise begin to descend into the barely-organised chaos one expects from these drills. The seriously-injured were cared for, wrapped up, treated and shipped off in ambulances and helicopters. The uninjured and the cuts and bruises lot were quickly and efficently gathered and packed off to the terminal to be processed over there. The omission being those of us with moderate injuries. We lay on our tarpaulin for best part of 40 minutes before even a blanket was brought out way. Our names were taken and we were assessed, but a full hour after the accident (after they had erected an emergency hospital tent, and cleared the area of all the other casualities, no less). We were given drips (including a paramedic to stand over us and hold the bottles), and eventually I was even furnished with oxygen.

Slowly, one by one, some of us were stretchered off into the tent. Roughly 90 minutes after we first lay down, I was about to be seen to properly. The chap came up to me, grabed me under the arm and aided me to stand up (cue dramatic ‘my leg is f***ing broken, I can’t walk’ theatrics). He wasn’t having any of it. “No, no! simulation end! over! bomba, real!” were his words.

A bomb scare in the terminal building. A real one. In a moment my leg was fixed and I was dumped inside the hospital-tent with the other semi-injureds. After a few minutes it was obvious that the exercise wasn’t going to resume, so we headed back into FTE. There was three of us, we wandered about looking for the others, but we couldn’t find them. We decided that they were probally over by the terminal building and so we decided to head over that way. At this point we were still uncertian for the reason for the termination of the exercise. Apart from the guy who spoke to me all they would tell us was that the exercise was over because there was a ‘problem’. We walked towards the terminal building, and straight past the police cordon, road block and more than a couple of the ‘Guarda Civil’. Indeed, it was only when we turned round to ask one of them what was up that they seemed to notice us and promptly told us quite frimly that we were not to go near the terminal.

We watched as an Air Berlin flight was evaquated, and the passengers moved away from both the terminal and the aircraft. We watched them push the aircraft away from the building, and we spotted the bus full of our fellow students sat on a taxiway. Poor souls.

That, I believe is all the jucy stuff. Now I’m due down the bar, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll see you all anon.